Phyllis Diller performs during the Bob Hope show for American troops at Can Ranh Bay, South Vietnam, in January 1967. Diller, the housewife turned humorist who aimed some of her sharpest barbs at herself, died Monday at 95 in Los Angeles.

The laugh is what everyone remembers. The crazy hair, the skinny legs, the cigarette holder, yes, but mostly the laugh.

Phyllis Diller, who died Monday at 95, issued a signature staccato “Ah-Haaaaaa!” to punctuate a cutting one-liner.

I was lucky enough to attend a dinner party held in honor of the trailblazing stand-up comic in L.A. several years ago. She regaled us with stories from a USO tour in Vietnam with Bob Hope and her early years in the business.

After dinner she played piano (she was classically trained) and showed off a painting, bought by our host at one of her art parties, a serious hobby she pursued in later years. Through the evening, and the martinis, she was a riot.

Diller holds an important place in American comedy as the boundary-breaker for generations of female stand-up comics. She made the testosterone-only province of stand-up safe for dangerous women.

She wouldn’t have counted herself a feminist at the time, and she posed a dilemma for young feminists who took a dim view of her self-deprecating put-downs. Her focus on her “ugly” looks and her supposed inabilities were an odd fit in the radicalized 1960s.

But she wasn’t throwing like a girl. The fact is, beneath the bad fashion she was quite good looking. Behind the deprecating shots, she was taking control. And while it may have seemed dated to hear a woman ceaselessly knocking her body, ultimately Diller was the winner, on behalf of all women, turning the barbs at her expense into power.

The lineage of comedy’s radical femmes extends from Diller, who represented an older generation of middle-American women (born in 1917), to Joan Rivers, who pushed into more socially/politically charged content as a modern, ethnic, East Coast woman of the next era; to Roseanne, who added a blue-collar, anti-establishment dimension to the commentary.

From there it’s been onward to the suitable-for-cable Sarah Silverman, Kathy Griffin and Chelsea Handler, all in Diller’s debt. By the time they got to the stage, supposed ugliness wasn’t a prerequisite to female humor. Years from now, maybe plastic surgery won’t be, either.

“I got a figure that just won’t start. My body’s in such bad shape I wear prescription underwear.”

Diller’s gags about her fictional husband, “Fang,” preceded Rivers’ talk about her real “Edgar.” She was the first to bring horror stories from the bedroom to the mainstream from a female perspective.

“His finest hour lasted a minute and a half.”

Diller’s proclamations about housework were echoed years later by Roseanne’s “domestic goddess” routine.

“I’m 18 years behind in my ironing.”

Diller’s talk about sex set the stage for Silverman’s musing on daydreaming about her Nana while fellating her boyfriend, and Handler musing about her most personal hygiene habits. The digs were gentler then.

Her film work lives on in “Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!” (1966) with Bob Hope and as a voice in the animated “A Bug’s Life” (1998). Her TV work is less memorable. Her first TV gig was a 15-minute show, “The Homely Friendmaker,” that aired in the Bay Area. She appeared in 23 “specials” with Hope. The mid-’60s sitcom “The Pruits of Southhampton” became “The Phyllis Diller Show,” and led to a later variety show, “The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show.” She made lots of cameos, most recently on “Family Guy” in 2006 as Peter’s mother. But her defining work was as a stand-up.

When Diller held forth, she was simply funny, not funny for a girl. And that was new and different.

She wore the ridiculous get- ups and fright wigs so subsequent generations of women wouldn’t have to.

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